The cybersecurity laboratory of Tencent has alerted about BadPower, a virus designed to alter the functioning of the fast charging systems smartphones and get to burn these devices.
Fast charging technology reduces the time it takes for an electronic device, such as a mobile phone or laptop, to fully charge the battery. Today’s more advanced systems can complete charging in less than half an hour.
For it to work, the system is integrated both in the device to be charged and in the one that is plugged into the current, specifically, in the firmware, and even some solutions are capable, in addition to loading, of transferring data.
The Tencent researchers point out that not all manufacturers verify the effective security of this data transmission process, which can lead to a problem in the verification process or memory corruption in the implementation of the fast charge protocol.
“An attacker could use these problems to rewrite the ‘firmware’ of the fast charging device to control the behavior of the device’s power supply.”, they warn in a statement.
In this sense, A charging device infected with BadPower can alter the charging voltage, until it produces “excessively high voltage”, which ends up causing the failure of the phone and even burning internal components.. However, does not affect the privacy of user data.
(With information from Europa Press)
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